Originally Lőrinc Mauthner made his living as a merchant, while his wife did tailoring piecework, but when the family moved to Budapest, the father gave up his trade and opened a sewing factory.

After working for several years to obtain sufficient capital in 1908, Máté went to Germany to study[1] in Hamburg[2] with Rudolf Dührkoop and with Nicola Perscheid,[1] who at that time was in Berlin.

[1] In the fall of that year,[5] Máté married the philosopher and academic Béla Zalai [hu], a widower with two children.

After her marriage to Zalai, it expanded to include the "Sunday Circle", (Hungarian: Sonntagskreis) of Hungarian intelligentsia, like Béla Balázs, Paul Dienes, János Fogarasi, Arnold Hauser,[1] Gyula Juhász, Dezső Kosztolányi,[6] György Lukács, Karl Mannheim, and others.

[1] Máté continued exhibiting, appearing at the International Photographers show in Stuttgart, where she won a gold medal with József Pécsi in 1912.

[7] Máté exhibited in 1914 at the Professional Photographers Society of New York State and later that year,[3] Zalai was drafted to serve in World War I.

[4] After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was defeated, György Lukács had been ordered by Béla Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin, when the rest of the leadership evacuated to Austria.

[13] During the 1920s and 1930s, her compositions were transformed, moving from the studio to outdoor settings with sepia tones replacing the sharp black and white contrasts of her earlier works.

[3] When Haàr moved to Paris in 1937,[14] Máté closed the shop and the following year went to work in the studio of Marian Reismann.

[17] In 2009, Csorba took an exhibition of Hungarian women photographer's works on tour in New York City and Washington, D. C. for the year.