Leopold Hugo, photographer, was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on 24 December 1866. He immigrated to the United States in 1889 and settled in Texas. He married Emma Pauline Miller in San Antonio, Texas in 1892. In 1907, the couple moved to La Jolla, California where he opened a dry goods store. Hugo is listed as a photographer in the 1911 telephone directory and he specialized in landscapes and nature studies. Hugo moved to Pasadena, California in 1917 and later to Santa Cruz where he lived for a year before moving to Pacific Grove. In 1919, he left California for New York and, in 1921, he returned to Santa Cruz where he opened another studio and remained until 1927. Hugo returned to La Jolla in 1929 and re-established his studio.

Hugo worked in both straight photography and the soft-focus photography favored by the pictorialist photograpers. It has been written that he used waxed-paper negatives to enhance the atmospheric effects of his photographs.

Leopold Hugo died on 7 September 1933 in Belton, Texas while on a family trip.