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While tidying up his home, Kei Sugimoto stumbled upon a video cassette he had completely forgotten about. Written on it in pen was a date: September 11, 2001. Once digitized, the video revealed harrowing images of the attacks, captured from a New York rooftop from an angle virtually unknown in official archives. This discovery moved the world.
An old cassette tape unearthed from the back of a cupboard
Nothing predestined this day to become memorable for Kei Sugimoto. He was simply tidying up his belongings when he came across some videotapes that had been buried for years. On one of them, a date was scrawled by hand: September 11, 2001. Intrigued, he immediately decided to convert it to digital format.
What he then discovered far exceeded his expectations. The footage, recorded with a Sony VX2000 camera from the terrace of an East Village building—located at 64 St. Marks Place—reveals the World Trade Center from northern Manhattan. This perspective is virtually absent from any previously known audiovisual archives.
Breathtakingly authentic images
The power of this video lies precisely in what is not found in it. No voice-over. No editing. No artifice. Only an amateur camera placed on a terrace, recording live the thick plumes of smoke rising above southern Manhattan, then the collapse of the two towers in a silence heavy with meaning.
This raw, unfiltered testimony—this bewildered gaze of a man filming without yet realizing he is immortalizing a fragment of collective history—is precisely what strikes us so deeply. Far removed from the televised images etched in our memories, we perceive here something radically different: reality as it unfolded before an ordinary resident from his New York rooftop.
The video spread across all platforms within days.
Kei Sugimoto uploaded the video to YouTube in July 2023. Within just a few days, it went viral. On Reddit, comments poured in: thousands of users from all over the world expressed their shock at this discovery, made more than twenty years after the events.