It's a paradise of sand and wild grass at the very edge of the world, with little wooden cabins that look as if they've been plucked from a fairy tale. Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, is well worth a visit. From Boston, you have to take a ferry that crosses choppy seas or follow the winding road along the peninsula. When you're there, you tend to stay – especially if you don't have a penny to your name and all your friends are also there.

In the early 1970s, a handful of such friends spent long months there. Some skipped their art school classes in Boston, while others did not have much else to do elsewhere. They filmed their beach picnics on Super 8 and took photographs. The lovers of the night before became the models of the day after. It was a time of experimentation – sexual and artistic.

Two friends, Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, were there, in this land of freedom, recalled Goldin, 71, reached by video call in New York in mid-June. She was working as a waitress in a lesbian bar and selling hot dogs from a stand. He was strikingly handsome and attracted many men passing through. They bought a machine to personalize badges, which they sold to people walking by.

They were certain that one day, they would become photographers. They would go to New York. They would no longer have to endure the disapproving looks of reactionary America, which hated them. One day, they would live as they wanted. They did not know the road ahead would be paved with hardship: AIDS, addiction, depression, the deaths of their friends. A hundred times, they would fall. A hundred times, they would get back up. Until October 26, 2014, when Armstrong died of liver cancer in Los Angeles. He was 60 years old. And Goldin found herself without her oldest friend.

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