In a Dennis Dunleavy photo you're likely to get a glimpse of an ongoing story. A mother and a child in the doorway of a refugee shack in Honduras, a migrant hiding in Texas, street clowns in El Salvador.

In a David Burnett photo you get The Moment. The revealing body language of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as each listens to his translator. Runner Mary (Decker) Slaney crying out in grief and rage after her collision with Zola Budd in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Two new exhibits at the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University focus on men with distinct approaches to photojournalism. A collection of Burnett's photos titled "Measures of Time" and a collection of Dunleavy's worked called "The Light Becomes Us" will be on display Tuesday through Feb. 24 in connection with the First Amendment Forum at SOU.

Dunleavy's work exemplifies what he calls the long form visual narrative tradition. For example, a mother and child stand in the doorway of a rough shack in a refugee camp in Honduras in 1989. It is a bottom-end shack, scraps of wood covered with rags. The subjects' buoyant expressions contrast strikingly with their desperate surroundings.

Dunleavy says the photo stemmed from "a real deep need to tell human stories beyond the moment."

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It is an approach that goes beyond headlines, suggesting to the viewer that despite dislocation and deprivation, hope and dignity may prevail.

The Schneider's Main Gallery is filled with examples of Dunleavy's work in black and white, concentrating on Latin America from 1987 to 1996.

News photos by Burnett fill the Heiter Gallery, while Burnett's feature and sports photos hang in the smaller Treehaven Gallery.

Dunleavy worked as a lab rat for newspapers, became a photographer, was a freelancer for the Associated Press and worked for newspapers in New York, Michigan and Texas. Working for the San Antonio Express News, he traveled repeatedly to Central America in the 1980s and '90s. He later earned a doctorate and began teaching at SOU last year.

Burnett has spent four decades documenting our times. After gaining notice for his work in the Vietnam War, he founded Contact Press Images in New York in 1976. He has shot news, feature and people photos for major magazines all over the world, often popping up at the moments that would come to define our times.

The light plays on an American helicopter supporting the U.S. invasion of Laos in 1971. Chilean troops round up alleged extremists after the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile. Elian Gonzalez is reunited with his father in 2000. West Berliners chip away at the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. In Iran in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini takes a tea break on a low cot in a small school room. Bathed in light on the other side of a window, thousands of supporters have gathered, and a man looks toward the window.

Burnett's photos mix historic moments with strong composition and geometry of light and shadow.

"Waiting and watching is the key," he wrote in an article. "... Sometimes you get it, as in all photography, and most often you don't."

Dunleavy openly admits to being a reformer and idealist at heart, so that his camera becomes an extension of his heart as well as his eye.

In making the picture of the mother and child, for example, he says he was moved by the heart and the resourcefulness of the refugees at the Mesa Grande refugee camp on the borders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

"Thousands of people lived there," he says. "Some of them for 10 years. They took care of each other. They had tremendous dignity.

"I'm still stunned thinking about them, how much wealthier in spirit, in a sense, they were than I could ever be. What they'd gone through just to get there, what they'd survived."

In the photo the mother exudes proud resilience, and the child looks at the photographer with the beginnings of a smile.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or bvarble@mailtribune.com.