Black smoke was already pouring from the World Trade Center when Kei Sugimoto reached for his camera. From the rooftop of 64 St Marks Place in New York City, the then-24-year-old watched the skyline transform into something almost impossible to understand in real time. At first, he believed he was witnessing a terrible accident. Then he saw the second plane strike. In that instant, the meaning of what was happening changed completely. Sugimoto began recording with a Sony VX2000 fitted with a teleconverter, capturing the towers from a vantage point rarely seen in the footage that would later define September 11, 2001. The resulting video shows smoke billowing across lower Manhattan before the Twin Towers collapse, moments that contributed to the deaths of 2,753 people.
For more than two decades, however, that recording remained unseen by the public. Sugimoto did not film the second plane hitting the tower itself; by his own recollection, seeing that impact was what prompted him to run for the camera. What he did preserve was the aftermath from the north, offering a perspective different from the familiar southern and eastern views that dominated television coverage and documentary archives. The six-minute recording remained among boxes of Hi-8, Digital-8, and DV tapes stored away with the rest of his personal footage. To Sugimoto, it was not a carefully hidden historical artifact waiting for the right anniversary. It was simply part of a collection of aging videotapes he had never fully revisited.
The reason the footage finally surfaced in 2024 was surprisingly ordinary. While cleaning out a closet, Sugimoto discovered the boxes and began checking the tapes. Some had already deteriorated. He said roughly a third appeared to have demagnetized, leaving recordings blank or badly corrupted, and research quickly taught him that magnetic videotape could degrade even under relatively good storage conditions. He began digitizing the collection before more of it was lost. Among those recordings was the September 11 footage. Once uploaded to YouTube, it spread rapidly, with viewers struck by both its clarity and its unfamiliar angle. The reaction carried a haunting implication: history does not always sit safely inside museums or official archives. Sometimes it remains for decades in a cardboard box because the person who recorded it does not yet realize how rare it has become.