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A young girl crouches behind the barrier on a darkened motorway, her somehow familiar face pale with distress. Something dreadful must have happened to make this the safest place to hide. In another image, a young man is sprawled unconscious, as shoppers walk hurriedly by. Something about him is familiar too. Who is he? What has brought him this low?

“I wanted to make people take a second look,” says photographer Kathryn Prescott, “to compel that sense of recognition, where you can’t quite put your figure on how you know them.”

In the past two years Prescott, 22, has forged a second career as a photographer but she is best known as the Skins actress who played much-loved lesbian character Emily Fitch in the E4 teen drama.

Next month an exhibition of her prints, What Makes Us Care?, opens to raise awareness about youth homelessness, featuring well-known faces from film and TV, including her Skins co-stars Kaya Scodelario, Lily Loveless and Megan Prescott (Kathryn’s sister).

Prescott has made her subjects look destitute and broken. Being Human actor Craig Roberts is photographed looking abject in the rain; The Borgias’ François Arnaud lies sprawled across a street in Los Angeles.

She hadn’t planned to use actors but her own experience of fame has shown her how powerful that sense of familiarity can be to get someone’s attention. Skins fans stop her in the street and ask how she’s doing, when they might walk past a real runaway. She wants us to question that value system. “Why does my face cause some people to come over and talk when the face of someone who probably needs all of these things far more than I do doesn’t get a second glance?” she asks. “Just because we don’t recognise someone from an area of our own lives, somehow it has become easy to simply ignore them and walk away.”

Statistically, teenagers are most likely to be judgmental about issues such as street-living, drink, drugs and addiction — partly because they haven’t lived through it, or had a friend who has. They think homeless people are to blame for their condition. By using cool teen stars, Prescott hopes to break down that barrier and get young viewers to relate to issues outside their own more protected lives.

For her, however, the set-ups she creates are a little closer to home. “I know people who have been without a home for ages and lots of my friends are sofa surfing because they are in between jobs or saving for degrees and other studies — paying £500 rent every month is just not feasible for them.”

She admires charities such as Centrepoint, which aim to break the cycle of homelessness and give people back their self-worth rather than providing short-term solutions for a very complex problem.

“A friend told me she was once warned by a security guard not to give a homeless man food because ‘it will only encourage him’. That really stuck with me, how often society views people without homes as nothing more than pests rather than human beings on the cusp of existence, in need of care or just acknowledgement of their own humanity.”

She is donating funds from sales of the limited-edition prints on show to The Big Issue Foundation and Centrepoint. Before she started shooting she interviewed Big Issue sellers and immersed herself in books and films about homelessness including George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Andrea Arnold’s 2009 film Fish Tank.

She mostly shot around gritty locations such as Camden Lock and Vauxhall and collaborated with a special effects make-up artist. “She’s good at making people look dishevelled but I didn’t want it to be disrespectful. I don’t want my subjects to look like victims.”

Prescott, who grew up with a photographer mother, used her Skins earnings to buy a proper camera and learned how to use it by working unpaid as an assistant for well-known photographers. It was tough at first, especially as she worked incognito.

But now she relishes the creative freedom, the chance it gives her to make a difference. “If you’re an actor you’re at the mercy of a script. You’ve got far more control if you’re the photographer.”

What Makes Us Care? is at St Martin-in-the-Fields Crypt Gallery, WC2 (020 7766 1100, stmartin-in-the-fields.org), September 18–October 13. Open Mon, Tues & Fri, 8.30am-1pm and 2pm-6pm; Weds, 8.30am-1.15pm and 2pm-5pm; Thurs, 8.30am-1.15pm and 2pm-6pm; Sat, 9.30am-6pm; Sun, 3.30pm-5pm; admission free. kathrynprescott.co.uk