A Getter s a is just any function (s -> a), which we've flipped into continuation passing style, (a -> r) -> s -> r and decorated with Const to obtain:

type Getting r s a = (a -> Const r a) -> s -> Const r s

If we restrict access to knowledge about the type r, we could get:

type Getter s a = forall r. Getting r s a

However, for Getter (but not for Getting) we actually permit any functor f which is an instance of both Functor and Contravariant:

type Getter s a = forall f. (Contravariant f, Functor f) => (a -> f a) -> s -> f s

Everything you can do with a function, you can do with a Getter, but note that because of the continuation passing style (.) composes them in the opposite order.

Since it is only a function, every Getter obviously only retrieves a single value for a given input.

A common question is whether you can combine multiple Getters to retrieve multiple values. Recall that all Getters are Folds and that we have a Monoid m => Applicative (Const m) instance to play with. Knowing this, we can use <> to glue Folds together:

>>> import Data.Monoid
>>> (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) ^.. (_2 <> _3 <> _5)
[2,3,5]