Courtesy of The CameraPlanet Archive
More than 1,200 hours of video documenting September 11, 2001, its aftermath, and the creation of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum will be made public. The New York Public Library on Wednesday announced it acquired The CameraPlanet Archive, the largest contemporaneous video collection of 9/11. Recorded by more than 130 New Yorkers with camcorders, the footage captures both the attacks and the city’s resilience in one of its darkest moments.
Donated by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder, the archive includes more than 500 hours of first-person footage recorded during the week of the attacks, along with over 700 hours documenting the planning, design, and construction of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
While some of the material appeared in Rosenbaum’s 2002 documentary “7 Days in September,” most of the footage has never been made public. For more than two decades, Rosenbaum and Yoder safeguarded the tapes before donating them to the library to ensure their long-term preservation and public access.
Photo by Dave Goldberg, courtesy of The CameraPlanet Archive
The archive will be managed by the library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, with public access expected to begin in 2027. Once available, it will join the NYPL’s vast 9/11-related holdings, including charitable response records and the reporting files of New York Times journalists James Glanz and Eric Lipton.
“As a city, we made a promise in the days and weeks after 9/11 to never forget. This unprecedented archive will help us do just that for generations to come,” Iris Weinshall, chief operating officer of NYPL, said.
Photo by Steven Rosenbaum, courtesy of The CameraPlanet Archive
To mark the donation, the library will host a screening of “7 Days in September” on September 11 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Celeste Auditorium at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Following the film, Rosenbaum and Yoder will join historian Kenneth T. Jackson for a discussion moderated by author and journalist Kurt Andersen. The program will be open to the public.
“At a time when misinformation, denialism, and revisionist history circulate widely, timestamped and contemporaneous video records carry renewed civic importance. The CameraPlanet Archive is not simply a record of tragedy; it is a safeguard against forgetting and distortion,” Rosenbaum said.
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