You may not recognize her name, but you’ve definitely seen her photographs: the iconic photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken hours before his assassination, a nude and pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, the album cover for Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” or most recently “The Custom of the Country,” Vogue magazine’s lavish September fashion spread inspired by the classic novel.

Those — and thousands of other well-known images — come from the camera of Annie Leibovitz, one of the most famous portrait photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A new exhibit of her work opened Sept. 22 at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus and will be on view through Dec. 30. “Annie Leibovitz: Master Set” is displayed the first time in its entirety at the Wexner.

The amazing collection of photos, which fill all of the multi-level galleries at the contemporary museum, will be of interest to both the star-struck and those who are passionate about the art of photography.

“She created a photo album of American culture in our time,” Wexner Center’s Director Sherri Geldin said. “Taken together, these images underscore the profound impact Leibovitz has had on our very perception of contemporary culture; uncanny in their ability to capture the essence of a given persona, her photographs have become virtually synonymous with their subjects. She has captured our collective history over the past four decades with bold and distinctive images that remain seared in our minds.”

You’ll see dozens of striking celebrity photos, beautifully framed and displayed under the guidance of curator-at-large Bill Horrigan. There’s Bette Midler and President Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Obamas, Muhammad Ali, Patti Smith, Angelina Jolie. The early photos, taken when Leibovitz worked as chief photographer for “Rolling Stone” magazine, are black-and-white, the later photographs are in vivid color.

Leibovitz, dressed in a black button-down shirt, black casual pants and hiking boots during a special preview event, insisted her interest is not in the fame.

“I have a great appreciation of what people do when they are at a (particular) place in their lives,” she explained.

The major part of the exhibit, titled “Master Set,” consists of images she has selected as the definitive edition of her work.

“I had three young children, and I was working on my will,” Leibovitz told the group that gathered for the media walk-through of her exhibit. She said it was during that process she’d realized she “really should make a set of prints that could end up in museums or institutions but there would be a set for my three young children.”

Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Leibovitz said she originally intended to choose 100 photographs dating back to the 1960 and ‘70s but couldn’t believe how much work she had done in the decades since. She finally narrowed it down to 156 photos.

“Each picture to me means something,” she said. “Each has some sort of resonance.”

Leading the gallery tour, Leibovitz stopped to share the back stories of some of her famous photographs.

When Mick Jagger called her to ask her to be his tour photographer, Leibovitz said she was “young and naive and didn’t know how music was made.”

“I believed I was supposed to become a chameleon and become part of what was going on,” she said. “It took me eight years to get off the tour, I almost died. But they are amazing pictures and it was a rite of passage being on the road with them. They are the pictures that capture that thing about being with a rock-and-roll band. You only need to do it once!”

Standing before her photo titled “Richard Nixon Leaving the White House, Washington D.C,” Leibovitz said most pictures from that memorable day show the president standing in the helicopter doorway.

Instead, she waited until other photographers had left the White House lawn and captured the helicopter as it lifted into the sky and the three officers, heads cast down, as they rolled up the red carpet.

Leibovitz, who took dance classes as a child, has a special interest in dance and in 1990 documented the creation of the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris.

“A dancer doesn’t always have to be moving to be photographed,” she said.

Stopping in front of a portrait of her mother, Leibovitz remembered that her mother was nervous and afraid to have her picture taken.

“She said ‘I’m afraid to look old,’” said Leibovitz, who remembers crying behind her camera.

“It was a complicated picture, and my mother didn’t like it. My father didn’t like it because she wasn’t smiling,” Leibovitz recalled. “When I was growing up, you were always supposed to smile for pictures.”

While the “Master Set” galleries represent Leibovitz’s journalistic assignments for a variety of publications, the second part of the Wexner exhibit, called “Pilgrimage,” is a different kind of display. These are more personal photos produced as she traveled through the United States and Great Britain capturing items that fascinated her along the way.

There are photos of Emily Dickinson’s dress, Henry David Thoreau’s bed, Eleanor Roosevelt’s sleeping porch, Thomas Jefferson’s garden.

Leibovitz, who said she lived in Youngstown at one point during her childhood, said Annie Oakley had been one of those on her “crazy list of people I wanted to find out more about.”

“I wanted to see her birthplace, and we drove to Greenville,” she said. She spent time at the Garst Museum and photographed the snowy countryside as well as Oakley’s riding boots and heart target.

Leibovitz, who said she came to photography through taking family pictures, said it’s “a fantastic hobby for young people.”

“I was shy and didn’t feel attractive or interesting,” she said of her younger self. “I had the camera and it gave me license to go out into the world with purpose.”