How can I bind my texture in the correct orientation?
Binding the image is unrelated to its orientation. A shot in the dark is that your texture coordinates are either reversed or computed with the orientation in the wrong direction. You could just rotate the image as a work around. The main issue here is whether the upper left corner is your origin, or the lower left corner is the origin. But neither of these explain the image being sideways. At any rate, look at your texture coordinates, how the image is being copied into memory, how is is being passed to opengl, and the texture coordinates.