Leonidas Papazoglou was born in Kastoria in 1872. As a young man, together with his parents and his younger brother, Pantelis, he moved to Constantinople, where the two brothers learned the art of photography in the studio of an unknown photographer. After their parents' death they moved back to Kastoria, where they started their photographic activity in the late 1890s, more specifically in the years 1898-99. The photographic needs of their birthplace in the preceding period seem to have been met irregularly by itinerant, non-Kastorian photographers. The Papazoglou brothers were apparently the first Kastoria-born photographers of the town, and they managed to monopolize photography in the whole region since the very beginning of their activity.
Leonidas was a perfectionist, a real expert in his profession, arousing respect to whoever stood before his camera. He had his photographic studio on the ground-level of his house and he visited regularly the nearby villages in pursuit of his flourishing business. He died in 1918 at the age of 46, a victim of the Spanish influenza epidemic which plagued Macedonia at the time, resulting in thousands of deaths.
According to all evidence, the two brothers were partners already from the beginning of their career. However, we know that they kept the glass negatives of their photographs apart, each one at his own home. Taking into account the beginning of their activity in the end of the 1890s, their special partnership and the fact that they worked together and with common aesthetic goals, we cannot help drawing a parallel between the Papazoglou brothers and the very famous West-Macedonian photographers, Manakia brothers, whose archive is preserved in the Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia and has become the object of international attention.
The archive of Leonidas Papazoglou, consisting of thousands of glass negatives, had been kept since his death piled up in some of the rooms in his house. Finally, the biggest part of the archive was destroyed, and only 2500 negatives (as well as a number of fragments) were preserved, almost all of them in the 13x18 cm format. It is obvious that the archive of Leonidas Papazoglou in terms of both quantity and quality, despite the losses it suffered, constitutes a find of great importance for the history of photography, not only locally but also for the whole of Greece. The excellent state of most of the negatives allows us - in a much more direct manner than Papazoglou's surviving prints do - to assess the photographer's great compositional skill, his originality, his psychographic abilities as well as his technical competence, qualities unexpected in a province of the Ottoman Empire.