First emigrating to San Francisco, two years later he made his way up the coast to eventually settle in the town of Alberni on Vancouver Island.

Frank left behind a massive body of work, much of it found at the Alberni Valley Museum, the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library.

He was born Leonhard Juda Frank on July 3, 1870, to a German Jewish family, at Berne, Wesermarsch, a small town in northwestern Germany.

Whenever possible, the two brothers prospected for copper deposits on the west side of the Alberni canal, yet it wasn't until 1916 that a producing mine was established in the area.

[10] Beginning about 1907, Frank operated a photographic studio next to the Alberni Pioneer News building, where he sometimes found work as a reporter.

[11] In January 1917, Frank was arrested on the charge by a local family of indecent assault against a child of "tender years".

[11][18][nb 1] Frank had visited Vancouver many times previously, photographing Stanley Park, and notably, in 1914, the passengers of the Komagata Maru.

[22] In the fall of 1918, Frank travelled to Haida Gwaii to photograph stands of Sitka Spruce used in airplane manufacture.

Other celebrity images included those of Roald Amundsen, Bliss Carman, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Anna Pavlova, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

In 1928, he changed his company name to Leonard Frank Photos, advertised as "Commercial Photographers, Timber, Mines, Industries and Enlarging Specialists".

[5] Frank was further honoured in 1939 to execute all the enlargements and transparencies for the British Columbia exhibit at the San Francisco World's Fair.

Only a few days earlier, he was in the Vancouver Sun office, remarking that his 25,000 negatives would provide the city archivist with some photographs of historic importance.

[38] With the help of Albert Urquart, and while seeking a new owner, Bernard Frank carried on as interim manager until he died suddenly on February 20, 1946.

The new owner of Leonard Frank photos became Otto Landauer, a Jewish refugee who continued the commercial aspect of the firm.

[40] Some of Frank's images were shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1976, as part of the exhibit "Eleven Early British Columbia Photographers, 1890–1940".

[42] In 2012, thirty one of Frank's logging photographs were exhibited at Simon Fraser University, curated by Bill Jeffries.

The title of the exhibit, Leonard Frank: Beautiful British Columbia, was as ironical juxtaposition of the phrase depicted on provincial license plates and the environmental destruction caused by logging.

[43] A travelling exhibition, starting in 2016, entitled "Two Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank", made its final stop in 2020 at the Whatcom Museum.

[44] The photographs on display by Adams and Frank had differing approaches to depicting the Japanese internment during World War II.

[45] An effusive account from a 1916 Vancouver newspaper depicted Frank as possessing "the eye of an artist and the heart of a poet", and being a "John Muir of the lens".