At the edge of Central and South Asia, the Afghan Pamirs appear on the map as an extraordinarily difficult-to-reach borderland. The Afghan Pamirs resemble colonial “anomalies;” they are the leftovers from the original designs of a buffer zone between Tsarist and British empires. Despite military occupation, occasional drought and the collapse of international trade, people have attended upland pastures to this day. More than a century of military and scientific exploration, adventure, scholarship, documentary – and tourism more recently – shaped the form and concrete contours of their imaginary constitution. In this imaginary, the Afghan Pamirs stand as a place out of time, because visibly out-of-the-way. Their remoteness underscores the fragile permanence of a time past – threatened to disappear with each new intervention. Central to many projections, the image of endangered Kyrgyz nomads trapped in time and modernity’s vicissitudes on “the Roof of the World” is not just source of local legend. The ambivalent proximity in monographs, photographs, and documentaries of Afghan Kyrgyz as both irreducible and endangered ethnic group reflects their allochronic dislocation as both object of contemplation and subject of state or violent power. Rooted into global frontier imaginaries, the image extends beyond. After an introduction and discussion of methodological pathways and ethical issues, an image series introduces each chapter along four axes: documentation, circulation, pastoralism and migration. The conclusion raises attention to the almost inevitable imaginary association of endangerment with salvage prerogatives.