Though Singer’s photos can be coolly appraising, they do not feel like the work of a detached outsider. Her previous series, “If It Rained an Ocean,” focussed on her own working-class family and extended friend group in the town she grew up in, Toms River, New Jersey. Many of Singer’s subjects struggled with addiction, mental-health challenges, and chronic money woes. Two of her sisters lived in campers on their parents’ property for a while after being displaced by Hurricane Sandy. Singer first picked up a camera when she was sixteen and attending what she once described as “the alternate high school for kids who would rather light shopping carts on fire than sit in a classroom considering options that we knew were for people other than ourselves.” When she was in her late thirties, she made it to the Pratt Institute, for a B.F.A., and later to Yale, where she studied with the photographer Gregory Crewdson, for an M.F.A., which she earned when she was forty-six. Singer was a single mother to two boys, who are now grown, and, as she told me, “We certainly ate from the food bank” at times. She also struggled with substance abuse. A boyfriend’s death in a drunk-driving accident shook her enough to help her get and stay sober.