In April 1920, twenty-year-old Marie Karoline Tschiedel took up a position as assistant to the artist in the celebrated Austrian Franz Xaver Setzer photography studio. She had also studied at the KuK Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and specialized in the fields of portrait photography and negative retouching. She became the technical director of the studio in 1934 and increasingly assumed overall responsibility for the studio. When Franz Xaver Setzer died in January 1939 as a result of a serious illness, she took over the studio from his heirs and continued it under the name Tschiedel-Setzer until 1980.