What’s it like to tour with Lucy Dacus, Jonas Brothers, and Death Cab for Cutie? A Philly photographer tells us

After some of the country’s most popular musicians take their bows and walk offstage, photographer Ashley Gellman is there with them, capturing their intimate and unguarded emotions.

South Philly’s Gellman, a tour photographer and manager, has worked with clients like Lucy Dacus, boygenius, Death Cab for Cutie, Jonas Brothers, and the Postal Service.

Gellman’s job, she says, encompasses keeping an eye on pretty much every aspect of the tour. Starting the day at 7 a.m. with a coffee run to a local roastery and ending hours after the band has called it a night.

“I see the venue, finalize the dressing rooms. I put up directional signs. Then I’m managing runners, telling them what we need to shop for. I’m calling hotels, making sure our bus drivers get to eat. Making sure the catering is in place, and so on.”

And through it all, she is always making pictures.

With Lucy Dacus (a “tea gal” with a love for Throat Coat), Gellman is the photographer and assistant tour manager on the ongoing “Forever is a Feeling Tour,” which kicks off at the Met on Wednesday.

» READ MORE: The Barnes Foundation inspired some of Lucy Dacus’ new album. Now it’ll showcase her portrait for a limited time.

Once a show packs up, Gellman gets on the tour bus and plays Mario Kart or Yahtzee with the others. Then she climbs on to her bunk and edits photos till 3 a.m.

“I try to capture what we’re feeling. I capture a lot of laughter. I capture a lot of napping. If you tour long enough, you can make a bed out of everything,” Gellman, a big proponent of naps, said.

Growing up in Goshen, N.Y., where her basement was plastered with cutouts from Alternative Press magazine and J-14, she always knew touring with musicians and photographing them is what she wanted to do.

She was inspired by photographers on Myspace and Tumblr who documented the music she loved — “a lot of pop punk, a lot of metal.” Her father, she said, was “a thrash metal, old school hip-hop guy” and her mother “a pop girl.” An uncle, only a few years older than her, put her on to Taking Back Sunday, TV on the Radio, and Motion City Soundtrack when she was already very hooked on Spice Girls.

» READ MORE: Lucy Dacus loves this Philly museum so much she began writing a song during one visit

“Basically,” she said, “I was listening to any band that you could find on a Warped Tour lineup.”

Gellman went to her first concert at 12 or 13: “Jonas Brothers and Warped Tour back-to-back.” She and a friend woke up at 5 a.m. and were driven up to Buffalo by the friend’s sister. They got there right in time to see Artist vs. Poet and You Me At Six, “who were the people I really wanted to see,” she said.

A former roommate later toured with a band that opened for You Me At Six, and Gellman had a chance to chat with the band. Last year, she worked with the Jonas Brothers. “My whole life has truly just come full circle. The people that I’ve seen through their careers, now I am in that same world, or I have contributed to their world, which is kind of crazy,” she said.

Gellman, 28, moved to Philadelphia to study entertainment and arts management at Drexel, where she took the maximum credits possible and worked eight internships.

“I think my life really started once I moved to Philly,” she said.

She had photographed her friends’ bands in high school but moving to the city opened up a whole new world. In her junior year, she moved to a house in West Philly and, along with her closest friends, hosted music shows in their basement. They called it JJ’s Diner. This is where she met the members of the Philly-based band Caracara, who are now among her best friends.

In 2019, Gellman got into a 15-seater tour bus with Caracara and traveled across the country. They took out the seats and shoved all the gear in, leaving only two rows for them to live out their lives for the next six weeks. They’d get off somewhere in the middle of a desert and take photos or go on a hike, and almost pass out from the heat. At night, they’d play poker on the bus — “betting only in nickels.”

“When you’re in that close proximity, you want to make sure you’re around people that you like and love. You have to adapt and get along. I got really lucky, and we still love each other to this day,” she said.

Befriending and working with people she clicks with, is perhaps the biggest lesson Gellman has learned. That’s how she keeps getting jobs. It’s a small, tight-knit community: most tour managers are friends and they refer one another when a job opens up. One gig led to another and Gellman ended up tour managing for a band that once opened for Lucy Dacus. They became friends and Dacus brought her along on her next tour.

“I’ve been very lucky that every single person I’ve toured with — from van tours to bus to flights — is my very close friend. If it didn’t start that way, they ended up being my close friends,” she said. A grueling tour always gets a bit easier “because I’m just hanging out with my best friends.”

It also makes constant traveling worthwhile. In a year, Gellman said, she spends three months at home. “This year, I’ve only been home for, I think, 24 days.”

Her top priority remains her cat, Thackery (named after Thackery Binx from Hocus Pocus). When home, she likes to take naps, catch up on her favorite podcasts — Who? Weekly tops the list — watches films (“Love a good 90-minute movie”), and hangs out with friends at the Fishtown pub Meetinghouse.

All the while, she is washing and folding her black T-shirts and pants, packing for her next tour jaunt.