At 2:45 in the morning the buses begin to leave KwaNdebele. The workers who board them are due at their jobs in Pretoria by seven o’clock; at the end of the day they make the same trip in reverse, reaching home between eight and ten at night. David Goldblatt rode and photographed those journeys, and the book that came of it, The Transported of KwaNdebele: A South African Odyssey, takes its pacing from them.

KwaNdebele was one of the tribal homelands devised under apartheid: a place without industry, with few jobs, set at a distance from the commercial life of white-controlled Pretoria. Goldblatt’s subject is less the policy than its daily arithmetic—the hours taken from people before and after a working day. His photographs refuse sentimentality and artifice, and the determination they register comes through in almost heroic terms. The book first appeared in 1989.

The Steidl edition of 2013 is the second of Goldblatt’s books that he redesigned and expanded for the publisher, after On the Mines. The reworking also widens the voices around the pictures. Brenda Goldblatt, a filmmaker and writer, interviewed bus-riding workers of the period; interviews with riders conducted in 2012 carry the account forward; and Phillip van Niekerk, former editor of the Mail & Guardian, contributes an essay on KwaNdebele’s place in the logic of grand apartheid and its half-life in post-apartheid South Africa. The volume runs to 78 pages, in hardcover and in English.

Goldblatt, born in Randfontein in 1930, remained in his father’s menswear business until 1963, when he turned to photography full time. Over more than fifty years he has been esteemed for a dispassionate depiction of South African life, and is regarded as a definitive photographer of his generation.

For a collection, the book’s weight lies in that combination: a photographer returning to his own earlier project and re-editing it, testimony from the people who actually made the commute, and an essay that reads the homeland system forward into its aftermath. It is at once a precise record of compulsory travel and labour in the 1980s and a considered late revision of that record.