They don’t own you and they can’t force you to post to your personal Instagram. My advice, if you’re looking to keep this gig, would be to tell them you’ll be setting up a separate Instagram that will include work done for them, as you’d like to keep your “portfolio” separate. Whether you post on that account is up to you, I personally wouldn’t look to promote them at all, but at least it’ll be a separate account if it becomes necessary or you feel like it.
The underlying reality here is that they’re looking to use you, they want to feel the ripples of any bump in social media attention that their staff photographers get. If your work starts to shine and you blow up on social media, they want that success to optically be attributed to them, or at least that want an avenue to take credit for it.
Fuck any company that hires creatives and then forces them all into the same box. They’re not interested in putting out the best product, they’re interested in being palatable and marketable and are way overextending their reach here. Do they ask their DJ to promote them and play their event company’s beat tag when they DJ on a weeknight? Do they have the same expectations of their videographers? I doubt it.
This is exactly it! It’s not “what is this photo supposed to say to me”, but “what are you trying to say to me through the photo”.
Why did you take it? What made you stop? What did it remind you of? If you can’t answer any questions, then yes you’ve taken an uninspired photo. Rarely is a photo both uninspired and beautiful, but happy accidents do happen! The reality is we all take uninspired photos, and if you shoot enough you’ll have a whole separate life’s body of work comprised of uninspired photos.
Posting the uninspired photos to the internet for critique or for attention is what we see a lot of here, and I think that’s what gets people all fussy.